Italy is a country where the Renaissance actually began and it dates back to the late 13^th c. but the shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance became the most evident in the 14^th c. this period is characterized by a rapid development of arts, science and culture. The cultural center of Europe was Florence, a beautiful Italian city where many famous artists lived and worked as well as many travelers and explorers of new lands did, since Genoa is a native city of Christopher Columbus. During 14-16^th centuries artists as well as scientists focus their attention on the real world around them. They began to apply to the history, particularly to the ancient culture of Greece and Rome. They studied works of arts of ancient artists that certainly broadened their horizons. Actually, there was a trend to experiment and innovation in the art which was reinforced by growing wealth of cities that helped support artists. This trend was widely realized in all arts. For example, in painting Giotto di Bondone, a Florentine painter, based his art on the observation of the real world, his partisans led by Masaccio used scientific principles to solve the problem of perspective and invented new techniques for representing light and shade. So the list may be continued and I think it would be enough to name a few but the most outstanding artists that, in my opinion, shaped the culture of that epoch, they are: Leonardo da Vinci, Rafael Sanzio, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Danatello and many others. But not only artists the audience itself had changed: people became more demanding, they wanted more variety and vividness. So such cultural and socio-economical changes led to the necessity to explore not only new forms in the art but new lands as well because since feudal relations were replaced by bourgeois it forced people to seek for new prospects for enrichment that could be provided by exploration and further colonization of new lands but such explorations became possible only due to the growing level of education and acquaintance with works of ancient artists, particularly writers and philosophers and general growth of European culture.

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